Pablo Torre Finds Out - Chuck Klosterman Isn't Even Here Right Now

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

One of America's foremost cultural critics steps out of the writer's cabin and into the studio to predict the future of a game that seems too big to stop: What happened to the egghead prophecy of Peak Football? Is 11 minutes actually the perfect amount of hyper-connective, violent action? And, in a Post-Winning Era, will the relentless gold-mining of fandom threaten the NFL's dominance, as soon as 2070? Plus: best laid aquarium plans, killing your fake darlings, old love letters, the meaning of nostalgia... and becoming Don Rickles for Bill Simmons. • Read "Football" by Chuck Klosterman• Take a PTFO audience survey for your chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. No one wants to see someone die on the football field, but the fact that it is possible does raise the stakes. Right after this ad. There were, I'm sure, at certainly at Harvard, there were people, I'm sure, who had a very pejorative view of people who had my book in their room. That's how it is.

That is also true. Yeah. You know, that's how it is. I'm not, you got to be self-aware, you can't, you know. But I was from. trying to figure out, like, when did I first become aware of you and how was I most consuming you? And the answer, despite you being a writer I've long enjoyed, much of the protestations of the coolest kids in college, like, Chuck Kossner. Bill, Simmons, the pot, you've been doing

that for, like, 20 plus years now. I would say the response I get from going on his podcast is about the same as releasing a book. And I'm not exaggerating. Like, the likelihood that anytime, if it's someone coming up in an airport, or I talk to a guy at the dog. park or whatever the likelihood that what they want to talk about is that you know i mean it's it's kind of i i it's strangely i've written 13 books i'm happy how they've worked out i've had more success than they would ever dreamed but i do sometimes wonder if if i'm remembered if i'm going to be the way you know certain carson guests right remembered right you know um or or certain like you know certain people who are on talk shows who are you know for who i i because it's just the magnitude of that

thing is crazy. I've been on that show once in person, and it still comes up all of the time with strangers on the street. It is intense. It is intense. And so the idea that you're here to talk about this book, which I enjoy, by the way, football. This is you also talking about what's in the psychology of this audience that I think you felt most acutely by sports podcasting. Oh, well, I wouldn't know if I, I don't if I agree with that, because the audience for sports podcasting is not the sports audience. Podcasting is in many ways sports podcasting is built for the world of sports outside of the games. You can be the person who doesn't really watch games and yet is able to have a conversation that seemingly could be on a podcast.

All of which is to say that this conversation we're having has been a long time coming. And we have known each other from afar for a very, very long time through the world of sports and sports media. But we never, we had plans, Chuck. We had grand plans that... I blame you, honestly, if I may just immediately throw you under the bus. Like, we had plans.

Yeah, yeah, we did. We were going to go to the Brooklyn Aquarium. Yeah. And, you know, it probably was me. It probably was me. Because I feel like that happened when my life had kind of shifted. I think I had...

What year was it? I had kids, I think, already. Yeah, we were talking, like, in the 20 teens. Yes. It's when you were, you know, you were on, you know, around the horn and like you dress like a manatee or whatever, you know. Oh, yeah, yeah. And yes. And it was like that or something along those lines. And we were like, let's get high and go to the Brooklyn Aquarium. I mean, it seemed like a good idea. But then I just, you know, I never got around it. There's this kind of this, there's a lot of people like that who I've made plans with who I never ended up seeing. I lived in New York from 2002 to 2017. And they're really, that's really bifurcated that there was. that first eight-year period, and that was a really incredible crazy period. And then there was the second period where I was a married person who was raising kids and trying to sort of become maybe a little more serious about what I was doing as a writer.

Hold on. The bifurcation of your time in New York, it sounds like you have great nostalgia for, at the very least, the first chunk of it. If nostalgia is injecting your own feelings into the past and misremembering the past, I hope that's not what's happening. I hope that what I remember is real. But it was just the way my life worked out is so unlike. It's not like my dreams were fulfilled or it surpassed my dreams.

I never had dreams like this, right? I never, I've mentioned this before, but like I used to, you know, like read Spin Magazine in college. So when I ended up working there, all my college friends were like, oh, what you always wanted to have happened is happening. And I was like, I never read that magazine with the idea that there was a way to work there. Like, I never thought that. I never met a writer in my life, like a author until I moved to Akron.

Like, nobody. I mean, I came from a town of 500 people, but even in Fargo, I didn't know anybody who were writers. I didn't, I didn't exactly know how it even worked. You know, like the, when I published my first book, I just, I just wrote it. And then you said, like, I wonder how to publish it. I didn't have an agent initially. I didn't know anyone in New York. I, it just worked out.

I mean, as with everything, it's like the biggest factor probably is chance, but, you know. But hold on. But New York and my nostalgia, my own potentially misremembered memories of New York media, pre all of this shit, like, working at a magazine was the best. Yeah, well, I mean, it seemed that that was the destination job, yes. Just the idea that, like, again, I worked at Sports Illustrated as a fact checker than Eddie is being in the magazine and those places either don't exist or a zombies, as I often say on this show. But the era in which there were expense accounts, the era in which the human editorial, discretion was the way that decisions were made about what people talked about and knew about and covered? Like, the idea that there were these institutions with human beings, editors, who had money to

spend and said, hey, Chuck, go away for several months and come back with this profile of someone or this review or this piece. That is a world that I constantly am thinking about. Well, but that's, it's interesting to me you say that because it seems to To me, just looking around that the world you're working in involves much more money. And it is much more, and there's much more money to be made. It is funny to me how when people talk about the magazine world of the 90s or whatever, they're always talking about expense accounts and how this guy did, you know, he was able, he had an expense of suit or whatever.

It's what they always focus on. But I just, that wasn't what it was for me. I just, it was like I wanted to write. And I wanted what I wrote to be seen by people. and I wanted to work at the highest level of this, and that's what it seemed like magazines and a handful of newspapers were. Like, it is, like, I mean, I've asked this to other people,

and this seems like an adversarial question, but do you in any way have regrets that you stopped writing? Because it's so, that's something that's like, you know, I'm maybe too rigid. Like, I can't really change. I still am doing, I'm writing this. Many people would say, like, well, this book, You should make it into a 10-part podcast,

or it should be like, it should have been a substack or should, but I want to do this. So it's like, what, why did this, why did you do that? So certainly, you know, coming from the Tony Kornheiser coaching tree, money, as he often says,

is the answer all of our questions. But also, what I am nostalgic for, and I'll answer the question about, like, do I miss writing in a second? What I'm nostalgic for is the separation that I had, from the pressures of metrics and audience. Like the installation of,

I need to make this piece so that my editor likes it was a different premise from, I need to make this piece so that I can dive into the comment section or I need to make this piece in such a way so that it's going to be read in a way that actually makes a dent in whatever version of like the conversation is. So the idea of it being simpler, I miss. And the question of like, how do I write now, given the new premise and the new pressures of all of that, I find myself typing more often than I ever have because this show ends up being in the investigative episodes, the deep dives and stuff, like structured and roadmap and structure is always.

To me, it was the key to when my writing felt good was when there was a structure and I knew what I was driving towards. And so I constantly feel like I'm writing. but the experience of, and I know you have a cabin at home in which you get to like truly be insulated, the experience of I'm at a laptop writing for myself and I then will have to figure out, is this good enough to pass muster with the editorial structure of this magazine

or with this publishing company? It did feel more pure. And that's what I'm more nostalgic for. You know, this might be like one of like the kind of the rare situations where maybe like our age does impact things a little bit. Because I mean, you know, when I was at news, papers and I've mentioned this many times. It's just, it's kind of funny and it's also kind of sad.

It was like, we used to have conversations like, if only we knew what stories were actually being read, all our questions would be answered. All we can do now is use our best judgment. If we actually had statistics, it would be so great. And who would have guessed the level of catastrophe that has been for media, you know? But there's also interesting, like, this is a real, what your operation here, very impressive,

but it's like a cooperative thing. And it's like, wow, It's great that we're all working together on something. And I am not like that. I like to do things by myself, have complete control over it. And then when I finally hand it over, feel like, well, this is, there shouldn't be any changes. This should be what it is. Were you a nightmare to edit?

When I was young, absolutely. I would say as I got older, less so, when I was a young person. Because I was also like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I felt like I thought about every sentence. So if they had an issue, I had three reasons why, you know. But I mean, I did. When I was at Fargo, I used to do this. This was, I guess I'm not ashamed of this.

But when I was writing a big feature, I would always include something in there that was crazy. So the editor would be like, we've got to take that out. And then like, I'd be like, okay, fine. But these other four things, like, I would, I would do that. I would add something in there that I knew. You would have a fake darling. that you would consent to the killing of. Oh, totally.

That was its only job, you know, because it would be like, every once in a while it got through, it would be really interesting. But, I mean, that was, you know, but that was when, you know, I have, I don't, it's, you look back on your life and it's hard to feel good sometimes, you know?

Like, it's hard to feel good because you're looking back on it with the projection of who you are now. Like, I can't get back into the mind of who I was, say, 25. no matter how hard I try in some weird way, I'm just imagining myself now, but I'm less fat and I don't have a beard. But really, I was a completely different person. The weirdest thing about writing books over a period of time like this

is when you write that book, you are frozen in time. And for the person who only reads that book, they're reading about who I was when I was 28. And they understand me better than I do at that age. Because to me, I would never go back and read that book. I would be terrified, sort of. to have to confront who I was. It's probably not a person I would like now.

I was going back trying to find our previous emails, which again date back now more than a decade. And I was cringing, not at the emails that you wrote, but the emails that I was sending to other people. I don't want to be the person that I used to be, not only in the writing I've done for public consumption, but like the private, especially sometimes the private writing. I cringe at that.

on the one hand it's like it had to happen for you to be who you are now i think of that might do it's like all these things in the past that maybe make me uncomfortable it was like that had to happen but there is not a person alive who somehow finds an old love letter they wrote and they're like that that was like that was like i i can't believe this didn't change your opinion like you never like that it's almost and and it is it's like you're looking at someone who is not you but it is you we want to believe that fundamentally We are the same person, our whole life, in some kind of deep way. And in maybe the deepest way we are. But, you know, it's just, it's an interesting thing. One thing that I like about football is that even as it changes and no sport adopts technology more and nothing evolved more and has changed, there are aspects of it that cannot get away from the way it used to be, the old ways of thinking.

And, you know, I think when I was. when I was 20, I only cared about what it would be like when I was 50. And now I'm 50. And it only seems to make sense the way things were when I was 20. And that just proves I'm a person who has the inability to really live out, like live in time, like to live in the present. I can't do it. People say like live in the present. I've never done that.

I'm only living in the past and the future at all times. I'm not even here right now. So in that way, the book that you wrote here, football, what would the version of this book be if it was Chuck of 10, 15 years ago trying to do this? How different would it have been? Quite a bit different. The fact that I'm like, I'm smarter now, I'm a better writer now. And yet there will be a certain kind of person who will always be like those early books are better because they can really feel there's a person there.

Like you see this with bands all the time. It's like they mature. Paul McCartney matures and he makes, you know, flaming pie. he's like, this music is better than the early Beatles. And like, no one else thinks that, but he does because what he looks back on is something that was like, that's when I was 22 or whatever. It was just natural. Now I'm actually thinking about it.

But what's in the early Beatles recordings is this kind of aliveness that could never be replicated or whatever. So if I wrote this book, maybe, I mean, 20 years ago for sure, it would have been more confrontational, more bombastic. It would have been more. attempt to persuade people to believe what I believed as opposed to being like, this is an interesting way to think about this idea. It may contradict the way you think about it now, but just consider this because it may sort of shift the way you sort of view this reality,

this reality of football. So, like, I think it would be terrible, to be honest. How often are you surprised, though, that people really like something? Are you perpetually realizing, oh, shit, Like my radar is quite different. That's a really hard thing to answer because I've been doing this long enough with having the good fortune of having a certain level of notoriety or readership that I think it's now very difficult for anyone to read my books in a straight way. I am always most interested in reviews in other countries because they're not, they don't have an idea of what I am or what I'm supposed to represent or, I mean, particularly the people in the media industry or in the publishing industry. industry. Like, those are people who sort of have a fixed idea of, like, what I do and how I am. So you want someone, ideally, to tell you what they think, having never read, like, sex drugs and cocoa puffs or listen to you on Simmons's podcast or anything.

I'll tell you what. Those podcasts I did in Simmons have been huge for my career, and they have been detrimental to the appreciation of my writing, absolutely. In one way, tell me. Well, okay, so if you like a book, like when Fugger Rock City came out and no one had ever heard me speak, if they like that book, the voice they're hearing. from that book is the best version of their own voice. That if you don't know anything about the writer but you like the work, what you're hearing is exactly the way it would be presented by yourself.

So it is like this weird sort of bargain kind of. It's like in order to be a successful writer now, I have to do this. If I want to sell books, I have to go on these pockets. Like there's a thin sliver of writers who can make a living doing this and even thinner slice who can just like, I put the books out and that's how it is. It has to be like they have to have somebody who had some commercial success and the perception within the publishing industry that this work is so great, we've got to do it. For me to do this, I'm not sure how people would even know this book existed if I didn't do this because people don't go around bookstores anymore, just browsing covers. And yet I know that it probably has a somewhat negative impact.

Or for example, let's say I say I say something on a podcast that the person is, is really bothered by. It's not really pertinent to what I'm writing about or anything else, but they're like, this guy is a blowhard, and he doesn't understand this. He's uninformed. He's uninformed about, you know, Luca Donkins or whatever it is. What are you going to go?

Well, then they're going to transfer that into everything. I mean, like, in some ways, it's like the writers who have been dead for 100 years. They have the advantage. Because all that is there is the text. You're saying Herman Melville could not have survived. in the sports podcasting era. He'd always be like, he overrated the whale.

You know, sperm whales aren't even the biggest whale. But even Herman Melville is, like, that's a real interesting example because with him, like, we do know a little bit about his life. He was on a whaling ship or whatever. So sometimes, I almost mean more like if,

I don't even know if this happens anymore. Does anyone just randomly read a book from, you know, the 1920s? And they just like, you know, but if they do, And they don't know the author. They just come across it in some library or archive or whatever. They are actually having the experience the author probably intended.

That these are the words you're supposed to read and the meaning you get comes from the collection of these words. And that will probably never happen to me again. Is there, just so I get a sense of how you want people to imagine what you sound like, is there a figure in culture where you're like, that's the guy whose voice I want people to think I have? No, my voice is who I am. It's like I don't want to be someone different. It'll say, oh, you sound like Quentin Tarantino or you sound like Mitch Hedberger, or whatever, all these things. All these things, fine, I don't, I'm not offended by any of it.

But at the same time, that means that what they are consuming is in some ways distanced from what the work is. I love that you have now preemptively argued with like a half dozen different potential listeners of this conversation. Everything I say, I imagine someone here. it. Everything I write, I imagine someone reading it. It's terrible to do that, you know, like a real artist isn't that way. A real artist doesn't do that. Wait, what does a real artist do? A real artist is in some ways myopic, I think, in that they are thinking about how can I express this thing regardless of how it is consumed. I think also, like a lot of times when you specifically hear an artist talking how disinterested they are in response to their work, that's often a sign

that that can't be the case, kind of, you know, because if they're really disinterested, interested, it wouldn't even occur to them to bring it up as something they don't worry about. Like that Thelodius monk quote, it's like, the true genius is the person who is most himself. And that is what I'm trying, like with this book, that's what I'm trying to do. Like, I'm trying to be like, I need to take the way I think and feel about this and transfer it to the page as closely as possible. I have to somehow wall off this idea of how it will be received. And yet, I'm doing it in public.

The reason I was even looking through my email archive in the first place is because I realized over the years that I had been thinking when I think about the evolution of football, I've been thinking about this talk I went to in Brooklyn in 2010, like February 2010, that Malcolm Gladwell. I was at that one too, right? And I didn't realize until I was looking through my email archive that you were also there. Okay, here's the thing. I was supposed to be the first person. You were late. I was late. I got stuck on the bridge. and to his credit. I think you were kind of stoned also, maybe?

No, I don't think so. I don't think I would... I mean, I'm in public. You know, it's like, that would be a complete disgrace. I would never possibly do that. That's an insane accusation. But that's when I first saw you in corporeal reality. I was like, oh, that...

By the way, and my reaction to you showing up, as you are in that way, I was like, no, this tracks. Well, but Gladwell, to his credit, it's like, he went first when I was late. And I like, you know, that was a, like, there was really no comparison between the level of interest, like, from the people who were there. But he goes first, and then I get there right when he's finishing.

And he makes this statement where he's like, in 25 years, normally eat red meat and, like, normal play football. Yes. And then I got up there and I was like, in 25 years, and not only will I be watching football, like, I might be eating the guys after they die. I'm doing both of these things. Again, just time and plays demographics.

Brooklyn, 2010, Malcolm Gladwell at this event. And he expresses an opinion that at that point was certainly edgy, but also closer to what the conversation was indicating, which is that the NFL was getting over its skis. With that football was, and Mark Cuban, by the way, it's funny. We watched Mark Cuban on the sidelines of the college football national championship game as his Indiana Hoosiers. He's now like the, he's now the fucking Phil Knight of Indiana.

as he's there, previously he had said, as Dallas Maverick's owner, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered about football. Like, football was getting way too big. And so I thought of that, and I thought of how I was looking up the timeline, like October 2009, months before Gladwell and you gave your talks, that was when Goodell, Commissioner Roger Goodell, insisted the NFL is studying the problem of concussions. And in December of Odine, that was when Greg Ayello, the NFL spokesman, told Alan Schwartz of the New York Times that, quote, quite obvious from the medical research that's been done, that concussions can lead to long-term problems, end quote.

And then, and fast forward, 15 years, and the decline of football as we stand today could not have been more inaccurately prophesied. And all the CTE stuff has dissipated from this conversation. You hear it much less, which is also an interesting thing. I mean, like, because it does it from watching the game, you wouldn't think there would actually be a lot fewer concussions. I will say, I'm surprised that when they said we got to change the way kids tackle or whatever,

I was like, that's never going to work. And it kind of did. I mean, the guys did adjust, you know. And I think that there was this idea that the way the public would react to the information or reality of CTE would be more dramatic. What it did do is in some parts of the country, this being one, the Pacific Northwest being one. And it's like it's rarer and rarer for parents to let their kids start playing football, you know, so that in some ways a fraction of what they said happened.

But, you know, the way football has sort of changed and become for many people, something they don't have a personal relationship with it. It's just kind of a distraction and entertainment thing. They didn't play. Their dad didn't play. They didn't have friends who played, which I think for a lot of people they're much more comfortable with, like this kind of bifurcation that like, well, football is something played by people I'll never meet.

and I can kind of follow it. But I want to actually explain, what you explained in this book, which I hadn't really understood so clearly, was why football became so culturally ascendant as an entertainment product. Because on one hand, it is violent, and that's the thing that distinguishes it

from basketball and baseball and soccer and all that stuff. But your analysis of why football as a television show is so astride everything, thing, and it's not close. In 2023, 93 of the top 100-watch broadcast in the United States were NFL games and like three or four more were college games, yeah. Right. It's still something that I don't think people have really internalized the fact that college

football is the number two most popular sport in America. For sure. And it's not close. Oh, yeah. It's pro football, college football, a huge drop off, probably basketball, and then an argument. Yeah. Really.

That's really what it is. I want you to explain that for people who don't. intuitively understand. Well, okay, first of all, this is a tough thing to, this is part of the difference between being on a podcast and writing a book. Like, if I could really easily explain what I wrote over those pages in a conversation, the book would need to exist. So, you know, football begins in the 19th century and involves as it does and collides

with television's rise in the 50s. And the way it is, like, television is a, it's the perfect vessel for this. And I don't think anyone would have thought that, certainly nobody who invented football had a conception of a medium that didn't exist. But there was that, you know, that famous Wall Street Journal article about how in an NFL football game, you know, there's three hours of broadcast and only 11 minutes of action. And that seems like such a death blow to a descriptor of a football, right? To someone, like, if you were trying to present it as a new sport, the idea that's a three-hour

event that's only 11 minutes of action. That was the implicit, like, fat that needed to be like cut down that Cuban and everyone was criticized. But the fact of the matter is 11 minutes seems to be the perfect amount. Because what we consciously say we want from entertainment and what we unconsciously want, I believe, are very different things. And the way football works and that it has these little brief, you know, four to seven second windows of hypercognetic, phyel in action. And then these breaks in between that allow us to sort of have the cerebral relationship to what happened and what might happen. and, you know, this is almost the ideal experience

for something to be popular on television, particularly over time. Because the intensity and the complexity of any given football play can create the sensation that you're watching something super dynamic. Like, almost as though it's happening too fast, especially late in a game when a team's in a two-minute offense or something, it almost feels like there's too much to absorb.

But really, it is those breaks that allow us to have like a cerebral relationship to this game that I think most people are, almost refuse to even, like, recognize. Like, they would never say this why they love football. They would say, like, I love the Houston Texans. Or it's like, I just like, they'll sit in my couch and have a few beers and relax. But nothing is really that way.

And I think that the reason football works so well on television, better than any other television product, is kind of a profound thing. The glory of this is, in some ways, accidental. Oh, mostly. mostly. But like the idea that 11 minutes of football allows you to have built in distraction time. It should be a flaw.

Which accommodated commercials and now our phones. Like of course, the NFL didn't foresee that. Pro football didn't foresee that. And I think it involves psychology and sociology of understanding the meaning of football, but it's not a blood sport. I don't believe that

people who love football vary. I mean, there's a fraction of people I'm sure who do, but for the most part. They don't want to ever see guys get hurt. There used to be that thing, you know, on ESPN where, you know, where they were like, they would jacked up. Exactly, you know. But even that, it wasn't like you didn't, they weren't going to show one of those if a guy got paralyzed, right?

It was the idea, like football, what people like about it is the game. It is the strategy. It is sort of like the atmosphere and all these things. But those things would matter less if it wasn't, there wasn't the possibility. of real injury. I mean, like, it's like, we don't, no one wants to see someone die on the football field,

but the fact that it is possible does raise the stakes. It's like a guy climbing Mount Everest. You know, that may be like the, like the apex of his life and the apex of mountains or whatever. It's like he wants to do this. It will give his life sort of meaning.

He doesn't want to die climbing that mountain. But if there was no chance that he could die, it's not a meaningful thing. Football in some ways is more meaningful, not because, that guys get hurt,

but because they could, and they know it, and we all know it. We're all sort of complicit in this understanding. So the thing of, okay, peak football and how you go from Malcolm Gladwell

is very wrong in 2010 to, I'm looking ahead and I'm seeing the trend line of all of this, and this is heading to a place of unsustainability. What is the argument for this thing is going to collapse? every cultural issue is really a technology idea and every social issue is really an economic idea.

If football recedes from the culture or kind of becomes this niche thing, and I feel like that will happen at one point, I think it's going to be for economic reasons because that's really what creates social change. It's always money in some way. But like when we're talking about art, it's often the technology that really does it.

Even though we don't think of that, we don't want to think that it's the, you know, Like podcasting is a great example of this. Part of the reason podcasting kind of usurped what used to be the magazine world is the ease in doing it. People would have maybe liked the more passive experience of listening to people talk as opposed to the active experience of reading it if that would have been an easy thing to do.

But all it was was like talk radio. That was the only option. And it would have been impossible for you, I think. Say if it was 1995 for you to do what you do and become a sports talk radio host. Correct. When society changes, Big things have a harder time adjusting than small things.

And football is the biggest thing. So in just a straightforward sense, it's like as the world changes, it's going to be harder for this to adapt. I have a suspicion that the way advertising works now is going to be seen differently in the future. I think some people think that I'm claiming that's like, advertising never works on anybody.

It doesn't exist. Like that's not, I do think, though, that we are overestimating the value of advertising. And it costs a lot to, to advertise in football games, right? Because that's your one option. It's the one place where people are maybe going to watch those ads.

And I think if as there's going to be a realization at some point that the amount that we're spending on advertising, we can't just keep inflating it every time there's a new contract available. If you're Fox or Prime or whatever. So at one point they're like, well, the number's not going up this time. The number is staying the same. And it's like, oh my gosh, what's, you know, the NFL is not that it's too big to fail. It's too big to stop.

It's got to get bigger. It's got to get bigger. What are we going to do? Maybe we go to 22 games or whatever. But just that premise, the idea that there may be a day, a CBA negotiation that results in a media rights deal that involves player salaries going down is currently unthinkable because we have not seen it in our living memory. If there was a major work stoppage in football, it would be perceived as a calamity.

People would be like, what am I going to gamble on? What am I going to do with my life? This is everything. this everything to me or whatever. You saw this during COVID. Like they had to play these games, right? They had to play these games, even though like colleges were not.

No one was in class, but they still don't play college football games, you know? And in the future, I don't think that it will be the calamity it would be now because people are, little by little, losing their real personal relationship to football. They see it solely as an entertainment distraction more and more. It's not something they played or their dad played

or their friends played. or any of these things. It was, it's like, it was only this thing that, well, we all watch football on the weekend. That's just kind of what we do. And when that stops, it will not be a disaster. We'll be like, oh, well, there's something else. And the way football has structured, the way the NFL is structured, it can't, it's not made to bear that scenario.

It's, it can't contract. So I'm not saying that football is going to be just wiped off the planet like a meteor, you know, killing the dinosaurs or whatever. It's like, I do think that the, dominance it has in the culture is limited. And I think it's probably two generations. So I'm thinking like 2070. Do you think that the popularity of football, the monocultural status it has, is itself a defense, though, against some of that erosion that people want football and will want football decades from now because it's the thing people care about? Okay. So right now, it does seem impossible.

It seems more likely that football would take over every other sport, more so than it would sort of receive or disappear. But the one thing, it's like kind of irrefutable, is nothing else has ever been like that. Nothing else has ever been the biggest thing in the world and stayed that way in perpetuity. Like, for football to continue to be the last vestige of the American monoculture, I mean, I would love that. I love football. But that would be an incredible exception.

If that were to happen, if football is like, plays the same role in culture as it does now in 2070, or if it's even bigger, that would actually be sort of a kind of an end of history argument. My personal view is also economically driven on this, which is to say that there is so much money available in sports. And on a relative basis, it is so, so valuable to every other media property. that I think what we're seeing now, the term I keep on returning to is fracking. It's sort of like there is this sense that there is yet more money to be mined from sports.

And what is happening is that there are decisions being made to extract that money that thread in the actual water system and the viability of what sports are and why they have become so valuable in the first place. And so the way I think about it is, like, whether it's, frankly, gambling, whether it's private equity. I'm thinking of these ways in which

the reason to care about sports has always been premised fundamentally on teams winning games or losing them. And now the money seems to be in these pockets that turn into these financial instruments that actually create a conflict of interest between your interest in whether a team as a team is winning or losing.

Effectively, these micro-interest and incentives and bets and decisions you make that are not in favor of, oh, this helps winning, but in other stuff, which does erode, like, the whole primacy of, like, why this is special. Well, I not totally, but mostly do agree with you on this. I mean, I, now, in the short term, it's interesting because, like, I have many conversations, like, with other fathers and situations where it's, like, they're talking about there was, like, some meaningless game that was on,

and they were like, oh, I said, put some money to. down. I wanted to feel something. I wanted the juice or whatever. So in some ways, maybe gambling is inflating the idea that like a Mac game between two teams that are under 500 could still be watchable, right? So in like many of these things, like the short term benefit is going to lead to a long-term detriment. But like, you know, the things that make a casual fan more interested are not the thing that make the person who loves the sport care about. I mean, I love college football more than pro football and the things I love about it have to do with the history of the sport and the culture around it. The idea that when you're watching, you know, Kansas play Missouri

in some weird way you're rooting or rooting for or against the kind of person you imagine who goes there, like all these sort of things in a way like the regional quality of it. And that's going to be taken away. That's not going to be how it is. We're professionalizing this. And again, you can't tell a kid like, well, you know, yeah, don't take any money now because, you know, years. No one's going to care about college football. You can't do that, but it's going to happen. So what I don't dispute is that the reason people like cultural products, such as professional football and college football, are because there is a version of it that they fell in love with. And that might even be, to my view, the best most fun version of the TV show to exist.

The thing that economically, college football and pro football both refused to to do, of course, is shrink the pie. Is shrink the amount of money available? And so I was thinking that one of the most underrated stories is the fact that the University of Utah just took all this private equity money. And the reason I say that is because it feels increasingly like, and this is the think piece I am mentally writing, it feels like we're entering a post-winning phase of sports.

Absolutely. Private equity, their main... Well, I don't even know if... that ties into private equity so much, but your overall idea is absolutely true. Oh, it's, I think a broad thing. With private equity, the reason why it jumped out to me, and I want to connect it to everything else too,

the private equity thing, it's their prime directive is just growth. It's a financial incentive. Is the bottom line better? It's not to win more games. Like the whole premise of there being an irrational booster or an irrational owner who wants to break salary cap for convention rules or just fund things because they love them,

it's only going to be worth it to them if they're obsessed with the team and winning a championship and getting to celebrate on the sidelines as we saw this week with Mark Cuban. If we replace that irrationality, that love for these products, for these heirlooms with a financial calculation because the money just needs to keep getting bigger, that's going to help break sports. Tell me this. Let me just get your opinion on this. This is like a little off topic, but like, okay, so the championship cup and the NBA, okay? Oh, the in-season tournament?

Yes, okay. Does it seem like the guys kind of play a little harder in those games? A little bit? A little bit. A little bit does, right? Yeah. And, you know, but they don't like to play in the All-Star game. And they don't really like to play on Christmas that much anymore.

And, like, we all kind of have always lived with this idea that, like, the playoffs are going to be different. The intensity is going to ratchet up or whatever. When you really think about that, isn't that bizarre that the expectation that when these guys play basketball, they're not going to care all the time. I mean, the amount of money that is there, the fact that they're the most competitive people in the world, the fact that they're the elite people, like, isn't it kind of strange?

Shouldn't the reality which they live in be enough motivation to play hard all the time? So that's a clear idea of what I really mean, which is it's not post-winning so much as it is, like post-maximum competition. It's like you want, to believe that in every circumstance, the people that you are watching who you care about so viscerally, like it's inheritance from your grandfather, that they are trying as hard as they possibly can at all times.

And so are the people who are funding it. So are the people who are coaching and managing it. And what we're seeing, whether it's the rise of gambling, whether it's the rise of private equity, whether it's the rise of load management. Well, that's maybe even the bigger part. It's all speaking to a goal. that's not trying to compete as hard as you can at every given moment. But what I think is even stranger, and the reason I brought up to you is how this idea of maximum competition,

that was considered an insane thing to demand, to expect. Like in other things, I know these aren't the same, the stakes are different, but it'd be really weird if there was like the best neurosurgeons in the world, like, head load management. You know, sometimes we really work on the brain. We really care. That's a strange thing. But in sports now, we have actually grown accustomed to the idea that, you know, that this is how it.

Some games don't matter. That some games just don't matter. And in some reason why I think one of the advantages football has is that even in a preseason game, you can't coast because you will go to the hospital. You will not exist. So football forces people. Those are the stakes. Yeah, it's not that someone could get hurt, but it's the physicality. The physicality demands.

It is too dangerous. It's a check on a lack of. of effort. Yes, yes. There's one part of the book that I wanted to read a bit because it's interesting, and it speaks to a view that I don't know if I share. This is what you write about football and the sort prophecy that it may, in fact, collapse one day, and you wrote, football is an ethnocentric game, beloved in only one country. This is not what we want. Football is violent, and its violence is sometimes praised. This is not what we want. Football is,

football is an exclusionary activity exclusively played by men. This is not what we want. Football does not reject toxic masculinity. This is not what we want. Football celebrates the ability to ignore injury and accept pain. This is not what we want. Football rewards domination of the week. This is not what we want. Football shuns individualism and identity. This is not what we want. Football is authoritarian and militaristic. This is not what we want. Football is hierarchically controlled with objective outcomes. This is not what we want. Football is uncomfortable, uncompromising demoralizing. This is not what we want. Football from a structural vantage point is fascist and reactionary, this is not what we want. Nothing about the culture of football is what we want

or what we are told to want or what we are supposed to want. And it's a beautifully written paragraph, but when I read it now today, I'm like, I think we want all that stuff more than what we realized. Well, okay, yeah. When I'm using the we that, you know, there's the we like, we are here, there's the editorial we, and there's also the kind of the we, it's like everybody but us, right? But I mean, I do think that everything about football seems to run counter from what we are sort of conditioned to see as the enlightened way to view the world. You know, yet I love football, right? So does that mean those ideas are actually what I do want? It's a hard question in some ways because some of the terms in there are not terms you really want to identify with what your desire is.

But there's the conscious desire and then there's the unconscious desire and that's the one that matters. The conscious desires the person who talks in public. The unconscious desires, the person who walks away. And it was like, well, okay, not really, though. You know, and I do, I think about that. Like, part of the incredible thing of football is that it's just everything that is sort of central to its aesthetics and ethos is so against what you're supposed to feel or want. It's why in 2010, Malcolm Gladwell, I think, was gesturing towards the end of this thing. Yes.

And meanwhile, I think it is incontrovertible that the descriptions you gave a football here, in all of its sort of, you know, power dynamics, I think those are all accurate. I just think that whether it's the hypothetical faculty lounge or the coastal pockets that we are coming from or whether it's broadly America, I just think that our tolerance for that is actually vast in ways that I underrated. And the question that I'm sort of like left asking myself, because you mentioned DeMar Han, and the almost fatality. If DeMar Hamlin or the equivalent were to actually die in a game in the present tense, I don't think that would be that big of a problem for the NFL. I used to. And now I'm just like, I don't think it would be.

That's a specifically interesting case because, okay, as it turns out, when I saw the event happened, it was like, boy, that didn't even seem like he hit the guy that hard. This can kill a guy. And then it turns out, well, it's this incredibly rare issue with his heart. The likelihood of it happening again is infinitesimal. It's just this weird thing. And he survived and he came back and he's good and all these things, you know. But it turned out that he had died due to this sort of very rare issue, cardiac issue.

I do think it would have been surprisingly easy to sort of recover from that. I think that like the thing that I used to always kind of think about is that like, okay, let's say the Super Bowl happens. You know, and let's say a guy dies in the Super Bowl. Right. Like, you know, particularly in this kind of event where that would be particularly interesting because there are so many people watching it who would never watch football in any other situation, you know. But all those things, you know, those ideas kind of that football, you know, like you say,

we have like a vast tolerance for it. And, you know, certainly there's social evidence that it might be true, right? But I would say, like, for you, I don't think you have a vast tolerance for it. I think all of those things in almost any other scenario, you would say unacceptable You would say that is an under, but you accept it in one spot all the time. So maybe it's not vast. Maybe it's specific. And if it is, then the meaning of football actually exponentially increases.

If it becomes the one place where those ideas cannot just exist but flourish and be an acceptable thing to care about. This is why football is what it is. I'm glad you read that paragraph. That's a key part of the book I feel, you know. It's also me realizing that, like, Like, this is why football is also this thing that people should be fluent in. It's our language. Just the practical and political and sociological motive of like,

this is a passport to talk to the largest number of people available in our country. And if you abdicate that, that language, because it feels uncomfortable in all the ways that paragraph explicated, then you're also surrendering. the ability to reach and communicate and plausibly be American. I think people in a way cannot escape football in a way they can escape religion. Now it's become very difficult to escape politics. But there was a time when you kind of could. You kind of can't now.

So now it's like football and politics are these things. And that has its own kind of meaning. Oh, yeah. Like, you know, it's like that sort of says it's like the thing that is most associated with the down the plate middle of America is the thing I hate. So what do I hate? I think it's the most dangerous political position to have. I can't imagine someone running for president.

And like, you know, and someone says like, so the Super Bowl is coming up, sir, do you have any rooting interest in this? And they'd be like, I'm not watching it. I can't fathom that. But this is, it's part and parcel with the danger, the danger zone that football is entering as the decades perhaps get closer to 2070, which is that there are so many other reasons to value. this sport. And the question is whether the sport's fundamental, whatever, its magic, its essence, the thing that gives it, its cultural potency, can be protected from people using it in ways that undermine the whole reason we care in the first place, whether that's, again, the financialization of everything, whether it's just the over-expansion of it into quadrants of this risk board that

don't really care about it, whether it's the fact that it's now so popular that it's being um, cosplayed in ways that make it uncool. I mean, it is, yeah, you know, this has been a great conversation, really fun. But what's interesting is I think that we fundamentally agree, but we have a key difference, which I think that you are outward looking and I am inward looking. So like, I think you are looking at the world and seeing all the ways the world could fuck this up. Like there's like this thing that there's all these almost like these forces, these dark forces doing it. And to me it's sort of like

well, it has more to do with the individual feeling to this thing. And granted, all those things you're talking about shape that. But I think it has to do almost with the perception of those things. Like I'm just surprised that we're kind of agreeing so often where I think in a lot of ways, like our

experience with this is very different. Or sort of like, and I guess I suppose somebody could say like, well, that's a, that's proof of football's value, that you can have these two diametrically opposed ways of looking at it and still come to the same conclusion, which is that somehow this thing with all these problems must be protected. Like we must protect this thing. Yes, exactly. I think what it proves is that if we were to ever go to an aquarium stoned, we would be insufferable for every other person there.

Well, I probably would be more likable than I am now, to be totally honest. I mean, I don't think there's a situation where people like, I don't want to. to hang out with this guy if she's high. There's many situations where people don't want to hang out me in every other scenario, but not in that one, you know? This has been Pablo Torre finds out, a Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.